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Exporting Evernote to Markdown

Published August 31, 2016 by doug

I have been a Evernote user since 2008. I’ve only used it for text notes, even though Evernote supports much more. I’ve never had a need to upgrade because my text notes never came anywhere near the upload limit. In fact the thousands of text notes I currently have is only about 5mb, which is way less than the 60mb a month upload limit.

A month ago Evernote changed their plan so that you could only access it from 2 devices. This was a problem for me because I used a computer at work, at home and my iPhone. It wasn’t worth it to me to pay $34.99 a year to sync text documents. Maybe if I used the other features. I looked for another solution.

Ideally I wanted to keep all my notes in Markdown in Dropbox. There’s a number of app which do this. I settled on nvALT on the Mac and 1Writer on iOS. Next I had to get my notes from Evernote to Dropbox as Markdown. Evernote does not support this. Evernote only supports exporting as HTML or Evernote XML Format (.enex).

Atter searching around I came across an open source project on GitHub called: ever2simple. It was designed for exporting Evernote to SimpleNote. This did most of what I needed, except it named all the files it exported sequentially like: 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt, … This wouldn’t work for me because the name of my files means something to me. I needed it to export the files with the title I gave it in Evernote.

So I forked it: https://github.com/dougdiego/ever2simple Now it exports the files and names them the title that was given in Evernote. It also handles files with the same title. Feel free to download this script and use it. Just follow the instructions.